The Meet-Cute Project

by Rhiannon Richardson

  Without knowing who he is, I have no clue what heading he might fall under. I remember the lists I made the night Sam told me I needed to find a date. All the weirdos; douchebags; and smelly, awkward nerds that my friends said no to. I wonder where I would write him in, but at the same time I don’t want to know. I imagine him as someone I don’t know, someone I can’t categorize. Maybe if his mask didn’t cover his mouth, we would kiss right now.

  “Come on, move!” Abby shouts behind me, bumping her hip against mine.

  Darth Vader lets me go, but still holds my hand and twirls me around. Grace comes up beside me and starts doing her usual shopping cart and sprinkler moves, which always make me laugh. At the chorus of the song everyone screams. We throw our hands into the air, and I find the words to “Tongue Tied” as someone starts throwing rolls of toilet paper all over and people catch them and toss them around. As I look from Victor to Abby to Sloane to Grace to Darth Vader, I feel something unfamiliar. I feel like I haven’t been present in a long time. I feel like I’m returning. I feel like I’m returning to something, even with someone totally new in the mix.

  I feel like myself.

  We keep dancing to the next song and the next. All of us bumping hips and having Darth Vader and Victor take turns twirling us around. I have to stop when I can’t catch my breath. Sloane and Abby are still going, and when I scream into Grace’s ear, asking if she needs a break, she tells me that she’s good and then gives me a wink that I hope Darth Vader doesn’t see. Even though I don’t want to assume Darth is going to follow me, I feel pleased when I look back over my shoulder and find him right behind me—Victor holding his thumbs up high above everyone’s heads farther behind in the living room. We weave up through the people standing on the stairs and make our way along Nandy’s upstairs hallway. When I see there isn’t a line outside the bathroom, I’m glad. I’d rather hole up in there for a few minutes of peace than have to step out into the late October cold. I hold the door open for Darth. He tilts his head to the side, and I tell him that I’m not using the bathroom, I just want some quiet.

  “You’re really cool,” he says, sitting down on the edge of the tub.

  I close the toilet and sit down on top.

  “You’re not so bad yourself,” I say, trying not to blush. He looks funny, dressed in black with Nandy’s kitty cat shower curtain as a background.

  After jumping up and down, I can feel that my buns have started to fall. I reach into my hair and pull out the bobby pins, and then I pull out the ponytails and comb through them with my fingers until my hair is down around my shoulders.

  “I like your hair like that,” he says.

  “What does your hair look like?” I ask, leaning forward a little.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Of course. I want to know who the second-coolest person at this party is,” I say jokingly, though I really do want him to take off the mask. I’m curious. Is he someone that I’ve seen before, either around town or at another party, and this mask finally gave him the confidence to make a move? Or maybe we’re meeting for the first time and both of us are building from a clean slate. I think, even if we’ve met before, tonight is like our first-time meeting—our first time getting to know each other for real.

  “Can I see your phone?” he asks.

  I unlock it and hand it to him and watch as he pulls off his gloves. He types his number into my phone and then creates a contact.

  “Really?” I ask, looking down at my new contact: Darth Vader.

  “Go on a date with me? Away from all this. And you’ll see who I am.”

  Even though I’ve been wanting this, it’s like I actually didn’t think that he could want to ask me out. I look down at my phone to hide my face because I feel my cheeks get hot.

  I text his number with my name and listen as his phone dings in his pocket.

  He doesn’t reach for it, just laughs a little.

  “You promise you’re not a murderer in disguise?” I ask.

  “I promise.”

  “You promise you’re in high school and not some creep who snuck in here?” I ask, trying to think of all the ways this could go wrong.

  Darth Vader leans forward. He pulls my empty hand into his and looks at me—the only part of him that I see is his eyes. They stare into mine purposefully, pointedly, and I can’t look away.

  “I promise,” he says.

  He doesn’t look away, and for a moment I have a sense of déjà vu. I feel like this is familiar, and I want to reach out and see if he’ll let me take the mask off. But someone pounds on the door and he stands up.

  “Anybody in here? Come on!”

  Darth Vader throws the door open, and I look over his shoulder and see Nandy dressed as Tinker Bell.

  “My parents are, like, five minutes away; you guys have to leave!” she shouts, before moving on to the bedroom next to us.

  We run downstairs and dive headfirst into chaos. Almost everyone is leaving through the front door. I see girls looking for their purses, boys waiting for their girlfriends, and people looking for their phones or where they set their keys. As the living room empties, I realize Abby, Sloane, and Grace probably piled into Victor’s truck already.

  I trust that my friends will be fine with each other, and I take Darth Vader by the hand and lead him to the back of the house. It’s less frantic, since most people don’t know where the back door leads. The night air chills my skin, but I’m thankful that it wakes me up out of my romantic stupor.

  “Can you jump a fence?” I ask breathily as we fall in with a few other kids running to the edge of Nandy’s backyard.

  “Yes,” he says.

  There are people dressed as ogres, as Pepsi cans, and as grim reapers. We all help each other by hoisting one another up the fence and then pulling the people below us to the top too. It feels slow as it’s happening, but once my feet hit the ground, I wait for Darth to finish helping a bumblebee swing their legs over the fence before he jumps down.

  I hear Nandy’s mom screaming from the driveway, the slam of her car door not far behind. Through a crack in the fence, I see her dad run around the front of their car, shouting for a boy to stop peeing on the lawn, threatening to call his parents. With Darth Vader’s hand in mine, we run, scattering away from the rest of the disguised fugitives. We don’t stop running until we reach the November Always diner.

  When Sam was still in high school, my family would come here a lot. We’d get breakfast on Sunday mornings, or Dad would get up early to buy us bagels before school. After Sam went away to college, it didn’t feel the same without her. We tried to go every time she came home for break, but then she brought home Geoffrey. They’d get up at six in the morning and do yoga, and then they would drive downtown to a French bistro Geoffrey’s mom recommended he take Sam to for a date. It became their spot, and our family hangout was obsolete.

  Sometimes Abby and I come here after swim meets or I’ll stop in for a milkshake. But now that we’re pushing through the silver-framed doors, I can’t remember the last time I was here. November Always will forever be a favorite of mine because of the retro style. Stepping inside is like stepping through a time portal, a time portal leading to cushiony leather seats and tall milkshake glasses.

  We shuffle into a booth and immediately pull out our phones. I imagine Darth Vader doing what I’m doing, trying to see what happened to whomever he came to the party with.

  My hands are shaking from the cold as I type and send a few messages to our group chat. No one replies. I try calling Sloane, then Abby, and then Grace. I cycle back twice more, and still no answer. When I see that my battery is down to 14 percent, I realize I can’t waste time calling my friends if I expect to find a way home.

  “Do you have a ride?” Darth Vader asks, reading my mind. I picture my car still parked in the street in front of Sloane’s house. If only she didn’t live so far away. If only I had enough battery to order an Uber.

  I can feel my heart racin
g, and I can’t tell if I’m out of breath from running or out of breath from the panic.

  “I can’t reach my friends,” I admit, setting my phone down on the table. I cover my face with my hands and focus on the pitch-black darkness. I count in my head and try to control my breathing. It’s hard to feel like this isn’t the end of the world as I push away the thought of calling my parents.

  “What are you going to do?” Darth asks. “I mean, if you need, I can give you a ride.”

  I weigh my options, knowing I shouldn’t test my luck for tonight. Even though Darth has been super nice to me, I still have no idea who he is.

  I sigh. “There’s really only one thing I can do,” I admit, picking up my phone.

  On the third ring, a voice comes through the receiver—not sounding at all tired at midnight. “Isn’t it past your bedtime?”

  “Funny,” I say, starting off sarcastic. I stare at Darth across the table, watching his eyes watching me. “Sam, I need you to come pick me up.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Twenty minutes later, I’m shivering outside the November Always diner with Darth Vader. When I see Sam’s car turn the corner, I face Darth and ask him if he needs a ride. I’m surprised no one has come to pick him up yet, since he has been texting ever since we escaped the party.

  “No, I’m going to walk,” he says. I still can’t get over his voice distorter, but I keep from laughing.

  “It’s freezing outside,” I say, still hugging myself.

  “It’s not too bad,” he says. I can hear laughter in his voice, and I can see the smile shimmering in his eyes. “I just wanted to make sure you got home okay.”

  It’s hard not to blush, but when Sam shouts behind me, the warm feeling goes away.

  “What about your friend?” she asks when I close the passenger door.

  I wave to him through the window. “He’s all good.”

  “He?” Sam asks, checking her rearview mirror before pulling away from the curb. She glances at me before saying, “I thought you only hung out with girls.”

  “I have other friends,” I say weakly.

  “Right, and where are your best ones?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who was that friend?”

  “I don’t know,” I admit, watching her expression out of the corner of my eye.

  I can tell by the way she contorts her face that she wants to parent me right now.

  “Then why the heck were you standing outside a diner in the cold in the middle of the night with a boy you don’t know? Mia, like, seriously?”

  “Seriously, what?”

  “I don’t get it. You’re at your yearly Halloween dinner-sleepover at Sloane’s house, and suddenly you’re alone at a diner with a boy? A boy dressed like Darth Vader—dressed like evil, I might add. Darth Vader was the bad guy.”

  I want to tell her to cut the crap, but I know I’m not in a position to do so.

  “We went to a Halloween party, okay?”

  “And did Mom—”

  “No, Mom and Dad didn’t know about it. They don’t know that I went to a party, and quite frankly I would like to keep it that way,” I say, trying not to think of how embarrassing it would be for them to find out. I can’t even remember the last time I got in trouble for something, and even though they were fine with the idea of me going to the party freshman year, I know that they wouldn’t be able to get over the fact that I lied.

  While I try to rack my mind for my last punishment, Sam asks, “So, last year when you went to the Halloween dinner?”

  “I feel like I don’t have to answer that,” I mumble, admiring the blow-up Halloween decorations on someone’s front lawn.

  “Okay, not going to lie, that’s a little badass. Not something I would’ve expected from you.”

  I stare at her in her slightly raised driver’s seat, her gaze focused on the road in front of her. Not the reaction I was expecting.

  “Nevertheless, I think you owe me one.” Her voice is too cheery.

  “Naturally,” I sigh, trying to fold myself into the seat and make myself as small as possible. This is more typical of her.

  Sam scratches her scalp and then runs her fingers through her hair. I can tell she straightened it earlier tonight, and I get a waft of the oils. Under usual circumstances the smell would relax me. But right now I’m annoyed at her. She probably washed her hair and did her nails and put on a facemask for one of her self-care nights and lost track of time staying up reading Michelle Obama’s autobiography or diving deep into the parenting blogosphere. And here she is, clean and shiny, validated as the Rescuer, my stand-in guardian.

  “I’ll have to think about what I want to use my one wish for,” she muses. “In the meantime, we’ll start with you coming to my dress fitting tomorrow. I still have your dress in my closet, so we can bring that, too. You haven’t seen the tailor once since buying it.”

  “The dress fit fine,” I huff. “I don’t know why I have to put it on over and over to see that it still fits.”

  “Because you might have gained weight or lost weight, and it has to be perfect. Also, because now you owe me and I said this is what we’re doing.”

  “Whatever,” I mumble.

  She rolls her eyes, hard, and then stares at me for a second before pulling ahead when the light turns green. Whenever she rolls her eyes like that, it’s usually because she’s close to her edge. I stay silent, knowing that if I even breathe too loud, she’ll just talk more to make me feel worse about tonight.

  Then again, no matter how bad she makes me feel, it doesn’t change the fact that I met someone. On my own! I look out the window to hide my smile, and I try to hold on to this feeling for the next few days.

  * * *

  As obsessive as Sam has been throughout her entire wedding planning process, the one thing that hasn’t gone wrong and hasn’t caused any stress or doubts is the dress. Naturally, she has a Pinterest account specifically dedicated to weddings, wedding planning, wedding budgets, and anything else that you could put after the word “wedding.” When we went into the wedding dress boutique back in the middle of August, Mom, Brooke, and I sat down. They were given glasses of champagne and I was handed a glass of sparkling grape juice. Sam was away for a while, reviewing her vision board with the clerks, talking to a stylist, and looking at dresses in her fitting room without showing us anything.

  I started reading an article on my phone about Jeffrey Dahmer while Mom and Brooke whispered to each other about the lighting in the room and the floral detailing in the wallpaper. I think I was on the section about his third murder when a woman dressed in all black came out from the fitting rooms with a huge smile on her face, tears brimming in her eyes, and her hands clasped as if she were afraid she’d go crazy if she didn’t keep them together.

  “Are you guys ready?” she asked.

  “Yes, out with it,” Brooke huffed, before swallowing the last of her third glass of champagne in one gulp.

  As if that were her cue, Sam appeared. Even though Sam isn’t very tall and is pretty tiny, in this dress she filled the entire doorway. Not like the dress was so big that it couldn’t fit through the opening, more like her presence was elevated. It’s an off the shoulder long-sleeve dress that has a slight A-line circle type skirt. There’s silver beading along the neckline, and it trails down the front of the dress and spirals all over the skirt like a firework. As she moved into the room, it was like the air we were breathing was pure elegance. It was like our minds were cleared out and filled with a calming white space, that space being the creamy white of a wedding dress.

  All of her planning. All of her online searching. All of her frustrations and color coding and highlighting and hair pulling—everything she had been doing came together in this moment. We were in a world that consisted solely of a three-way mirror that captured every angle of the Dress.

  “My gosh,” Mom gasped, clutching her chest. She too fell into tears. She stood up, went to Sam, and held her face i
n her hands and said, “My Samantha, when did you become so grown-up? It’s like yesterday you wouldn’t let go of my hand when I was dropping you off at preschool, and now… Oh my.”

  Brooke said she didn’t get how Sam could walk into a store and the first dress she puts on is the One. Maybe, even though Brooke is Sam’s best friend, she doesn’t know Sam that well. Because I know everything that built up to this moment. I know that Sam picked this store because she did the research. I know she picked this dress because she figured out the best fit for her body type, what kind of detailing would complement her curves if she wanted something more fitted versus loose. I know that because of who she is, she was able to nail this one on the first try.

  And yes, that first moment when we saw her in the Dress was magical and beautiful and blah, blah, blah. But now, after however many times she’s come to the tailor to try it on, the scene is old. I’ve been to two of her fittings since she started alterations. At the last one, when she stood, admiring herself in the mirror, her trying Veil? No veil? Veil? is what did me in.

  So, my lack of enthusiasm should be understandable as Sam pulls up to the stoplight with a huge unnecessary grin on her face.

  “This is exciting,” she says, leaning up to peek at herself in her rearview mirror. She rubs her lips together to try to spread out some of the tinted lip balm she just put on, before settling back down. When the light turns green, we pull out of the parking garage under Sam’s apartment building downtown. Even though her apartment has a view of Lake Michigan, once we’re on the ground, all we can see are buildings, pedestrians, and more buildings.